Monday, May 15, 2017

After an unsuccessful attempt on Peak Lenin in early July, and a fun but misadventure-filled hiking excursion in Kyrgyzstan with my friend Eric, Monday, July 30th, 2012 found Eric
and I joining a number of other clients of Asia Mountains climbing into an overstuffed
minivan at the Asia Mountains headquarters in Bishkek, headed to climb Muztagh
Ata (literally "The Father of Ice Mountains") in far western China. We loaded a
ridiculous quantity of gear into the van, with my ski bag a particular
challenge. There were other sets of
skis, but none that were quite as long as mine, and it took some fancy
arranging to get them to fit in. We were
a diverse group: Eric and myself; an
Austrian couple (Enrico and Anna) with whom I would spend a lot of time over
the next three weeks; Sergey Baranov (a mountain guide from Almaty) and a
friend of his; a couple of Georgian climbers, one of them fairly old but a Snow Leopard (someone who has summited the five 7000-metre peaks in the former
USSR); and a couple of other climbers who made so little impression on me that
I can’t even remember where they were from, or what they looked like. By 11 am we were loaded and trundling out of
Bishkek, headed south to the town of Naryn.

Duuuude! Channeling my inner Messner in Bishkek

Compared to my attempt on Peak
Lenin, our expedition to Muztagh Ata was a much bigger, more complicated
undertaking. From Bishkek, I took an
hour-long flight to Osh and then a four-hour drive to get to Peak Lenin Base
Camp, and was there in time for a late lunch.
From Bishkek we would drive for three days and walk for another to get
to Muztagh Ata base camp. Because it was
a cross-border expedition, there was a lot more bureaucracy involved,
especially for crossing the border at the Torugart Pass. Crucially, it also meant that Asia Mountains,
who had run base camp and Camp One on Peak Lenin very professionally and
efficiently, and who were organizing this climb as well, had to work with a
Chinese partner company for services in base camp. All this travel, border crossing and using a
Chinese company added up to a climb that cost almost three times as much as
Peak Lenin had, but it was still not an excessive sum for a trip that would
last 24 days, Bishkek to Bishkek, and would cover all expenses.

It was an uneventful drive to
Naryn along smooth tarmac most of the way; with a lunch stop at Kochkar, we
were in Naryn by 5 pm, where we stayed at a large apartment owned by Asia
Mountains. We had a wander around town
and down to the river before dinner, admiring the concrete brutalist Soviet
architecture of the town and enjoying the rushing highland river that flowed
through town. Maria, our vivacious Asia
Mountains representative, chatted animatedly as we walked around town, before
leading us back to the apartment for a big, hearty meal. We were in bed early, ready for an early
start the next morning to get to Kashgar.

Both Eric and I had been to
Kashgar before, as we had both travelled along the Karakoram Highway from
Pakistan in the past; I had ridden my bicycle with my sisters and their
partners back in 1998, while Eric had visited the same year while he was
working as a doctor in Afghanistan.
Neither of us had visited the city since then, and I looked forward to
seeing what had changed in a city that I had really liked for its Central Asian
culture, its old town, its old men and its great hats, not to mention its
mythical Sunday Market.

Another washout of the road to Kashgar (photo: Enrico Schirmer)

The day did not go well. We left Naryn at 8:30 and bumped along under
threatening dark skies on a pretty poor road through the lovely scenery of the
At Bati valley, getting to the border by 12:30.
Sadly, we had to bypass the turnoff to the ancient Tash Rabat caravanserai that is
supposed to be a highlight of this route. Torugart is not a standard border
crossing; all crossings have to be pre-approved by the Chinese, and Chinese
transport has to be pre-arranged to come pick you up at the border to take you
to Kashgar. Even cycle tourists aren’t
allowed to pedal their way between the border and the pass in either direction,
a pointless piece of Chinese killjoy regulation. We unloaded our mountain of gear from the
Kyrgyz minivan, ate our picnic lunches that Maria had brought with us from
Naryn, and waited for the Chinese bus to arrive. We waited a long time, and arrived bearing
news of flash floods that had delayed them on the way from Kashgar. We got onto the bus, wrangled our
mountaineering gear in with us (there was a lot more room in the Chinese bus)
and set off.

Me contemplating the washed-out road (photo: Enrico Schirmer)

Those dark clouds that we had
seen on the way to the border had gotten to the Chinese side of the frontier
and released their moisture in great torrents as we drove downhill. It ordinarily takes only about 3 hours to get
to Kashgar from Torugart, and we anticipated being in Kashgar by 6. It didn’t work out that way. We ran into not just one, but four flash
floods actively in flood. Each one
required a lengthy wait for the water to drop, or for rubble to be cleared by
hand to allow us to continue. There were
also spots where deluges had come and gone, but the rocks and mud left behind
required hard work to clear them. To add
spice to the mix, we had a prolonged border crossing at the Chinese border post
(downhill from the actual frontier), an overturned truck on the road, another
truck mired in mud, and an enormous traffic jam of trucks in front of us. It was long, hard, frustrating travel, and we
arrived at our hotel in Kashgar at 10:30 pm after eight and a half hours of
travel. We arrived at our huge Chinese
hotel to be told that since we had arrived so late, the restaurant was
closed. We were all starving, so our
Chinese guide took us out to a late-night Uighur restaurant where a big feast
of laghman (fried fat noodles, a local Uighur specialty) and shashlik staved
off starvation. We then returned to the
Shinde Hotel and collapsed into bed.

Another delay on the road to Kashgar

Eric and I woke up the next
morning in our room on the 13th floor of the hotel to the sound of
loudspeakers. We looked out the window
and spotted workers at the company across the street gathered outside to listen
to some sort of harangue from their boss.
The view from the hotel took us completely by surprise. Gone was the mid-sized town, full of old
Central Asian adobe low-rise buildings, that we had seen in 1998. In its place rose an enormous Chinese
metropolis, full of high-rise blocks and construction cranes. Broad avenues and neon signs,
indistinguishable from hundreds of other new Chinese cities, had been
constructed over the demolished old neighbourhoods. Looking down, most of the pedestrians we saw
looked Chinese rather than Uighur, and we could see Chinese soldiers patrolling
ostentatiously on the street.

Some blatant falsehoods at the Eid Gah Mosque, Kashgar

We had an underwhelming hotel
breakfast, then had an hour to wait while our bus driver had a flat tire fixed,
a souvenir of the rocks we had driven across on one of the washouts the day
before. We walked to the Eid Gah Mosque,
one of the oldest and largest mosques in Xinjiang and the focus of the former
old town. There was a huge new
Chinese-style pedestrian square outside the mosque’s front entrance, built by
demolishing a few blocks of old buildings, allegedly to allow quick access to
the area by Chinese troops in the case of unrest. There were dozens of hotels and souvenir
shops all around the mosque, giving it a faintly Disneyland air. Inside, though, it was still as spectacular
as I remembered it. At the main
entrance, however, there was a fatuous sign put up by the government about how
they were promoting harmony between ethnic groups and guaranteeing religious
freedom. Xinjiang has been even more of a
hotbed of opposition to Chinese rule over the past 15 years than Tibet, and
Kashgar has been one of the more active areas for protests and anti-Chinese
attacks. The Uighurs, a group of
Turkic-speaking Muslims who have inhabited the area for the past 1200 years or
so, are less than enthusiastic about being part of Communist China, about being
swamped by ethnic Chinese immigrants from eastern China, about being
economically marginalized, about being prevented from going on pilgrimage to
Mecca, about being prevented from practicing their religion, and about being
treated as inferiors by the ethnic Chinese.
As I write these words in 2017, the Chinese government has recently outlawed “religious” names for babies in Xinjiang, as well as beards for young men and “abnormal” beards for older men.
Essentially Xinjiang is a Chinese colony, with China borrowing from the
American, Canadian, Australian, Argentinian and Israeli playbooks by importing
huge numbers of “the right kind” of settlers from elsewhere to overwhelm the
indigenous population and push them to the margins in order to cement central
government control over the region.
According to what we heard in Kashgar, each city in Xinjiang has been
twinned with a much larger city in eastern China; Kashgar’s twin city is the
boom town of Shenzhen in the Pearl River Delta.
Each of the Chinese twin cities has to send a certain quota of new
settlers every year to make sure that within a few years the Uighurs will be a
minority, unable to cause further problems to the government in Beijing.

Our first good view of Il Pannetone

We mused on the wrenching changes
as we set off on the repaired bus. We
drove south from Kashgar, in the direction of the Pakistani border. We had a lunch stop in the small town of
Opal, where numerous Chinese tour groups had stopped for food, along with a
group of very glamorous Uighur fashion models.
From there we left behind the flat expanse of the Tarim Basin and headed
up the Ghez Canyon, where a huge new hydroelectric development was disfiguring
what had been a dramatic gorge. When we
emerged into the high plateau above the gorge, we found the extensive
pasturelands for the Kyrgyz nomads that I remembered cycling across completely
submerged in the waters of the new dam’s reservoir. We made it to idyllic Lake Karakul, where we
had camped very contentedly back in 1998, and drove around it to get to
Subashi, a collection of rather ugly concrete yurts where we unloaded our
luggage. The views were awe-inspiring,
with Kongur, the highest peak in the Pamirs, towering on the other side of the
plateau, wreathed in cloud. In the
opposite direction loomed Muztagh Ata, which Eric had named Il Pannetone after
its resemblance to this Italian dessert, looking enormous and spectacular,
although with its summit also hidden in cloud.

We moved into our rather spartan
quarters and then met Igor, the local representative and guide for Asia
Mountains, who was accompanying the previous week’s group of Asia Mountains
climbers back from a day off in nearby Tashkurgan. We talked with him after an equally spartan
meal about logistical details. Just
before the sun set, the clouds on Il Pannetone

lifted and with binoculars we
were able to make out the line of camps leading almost to the summit of the
mountain. It all looked so close and
easy.

The First Round

On the trudge from the end of the road to Base Camp, with the mountain behind

Thursday, August 2nd
saw us finally arrive in base camp.
Another pretty sparse breakfast (an utter contrast with the lavish
spreads we always had with Asia Mountains on Peak Lenin) at 8 am, and by 8:45
we had loaded our luggage onto a jeep and set off on foot to walk to base
camp. It was an easy, pleasant walk
across a plain, through a few agonizingly cold rivers and then up old moraines
to base camp. It was a huge place, with
well over 100 tents. It was very
Chinese, right down to the unspeakably filthy toilets. We found the section of the camp that was
Asia Mountains, and Eric and I settled into a large 4-man base camp tent that
we had to put up ourselves because the base camp manager, a shifty Uighur named
Akbar, hadn’t gotten around to erecting it.
Eric was not impressed with the lack of preparation, and it was a
foreshadowing of things to come. We had
another underwhelming lunch, drank tea and then settled in for a nap. The weather was glorious, with the summit
perfectly clear; it would have been a perfect day for a summit attempt. I loved being back in the wide-open spaces
that I remembered from my long-ago bike trip.

After our nap, we awoke to find
that Akbar had messed up by giving us the tent that he did. We would have to move to a much smaller tent
the next day; Eric was again not very impressed with Akbar’s general competence
and acumen. Both of us found our pulses
racing as we tried to fall asleep; we were feeling the effects of being at 4400
metres above sea level.

August 3rd was a rest
day, spent in base camp. We first moved
to a new tent (which we had to put up ourselves again; it was beneath Akbar’s
dignity to actually do any physical work), then spent the day lazing, eating,
reading and chatting with other climbers, both Afto (the younger of the two
Georgians, a surgeon from Tbilisi) and a group of Lithuanians who were using
the services of another base camp company.
The Lithuanians had had a run-in with the Chinese army commander in
charge of the base camp when they went for an acclimatization hike in the hills
around the base of the mountain. They
had been arrested, threatened with deportation and slapped with a fine of US$
300 per person for deviating from the usual mountaineering route. The Chinese are hypersensitive about tourists
in Xinjiang; the cycling route which we had followed in 1998 is now out of
bounds, with the Chinese insisting that cyclists be loaded into buses or jeeps
between Sust, Pakistan and Tashkurgan, Xinjiang. As well, other climbers reported being
threatened with arrest for having cellular data modems on their computers in
base camp; all the Chinese were using them, as there was a cell phone tower
right in base camp, but they were, apparently, forbidden to foreigners. At least we were allowed to have Chinese SIM
cards in our phones, which was just as well as we could use them for
communication on the mountain, whereas walkie talkies were forbidden to
foreigners. We shook our heads at the
insanity of it all.

Leaving Base Camp

Saturday, August 4th
saw us make our first move up the mountain.
We paid a porter a pretty hefty sum (something like US$130) to carry our
food and gas supplies up to Camp One while Eric and I walked up with our
skis. Although it was expensive, I
thought that it might be worth it, as one of the many mistakes I had made on
Peak Lenin was wearing myself out early in the climb carrying heavy bags from
base camp to Camp One. We awoke to
pretty heavy snow, and lingered over breakfast waiting for the snowfall to
stop. Finally, around 10:30, we donned
our packs, with our skis perched on the sides like giant antennas, and set
off. We had read that in most years you
can walk in hiking boots all the way to Camp One, but this year had been a very
cold, snowy summer on the mountain and the snowline was at 5100 metres, 250
metres below Camp One. We trudged up the
steep scree slope until a lunch stop at 12:30 at 4900 metres, where we gorged
on raisins, nuts, cheese and Snickers bars and slugged down a couple of
thermoses of tea while having an involved philosophical discussion. By 1:20 we had shouldered packs again and
were moving uphill, quite a bit slower now as altitude (and an upset stomach,
in my case) started to bite. Eric
flagged even more than me, and it began to snow again. By the time we reached the snowline, Eric had
had enough and turned around to head back to base camp, stashing his skis
beside the trail. I put on my skis and
climbing skins and slogged onwards, getting to Camp One, a random scattering of
brightly coloured tents, just before 4:00 pm.
It was still snowing and there was a biting wind as I laboriously dug a
platform for the tent in the snow, then erected the tent (just about losing a
few fingers to frostbite in the process!).
I stashed my gear and the food and fuel that had been delivered by the
porters, zipped up the fly and set off on foot downhill, having used the skis
as anchors for guy ropes for the tent.

Eric on the way up from Base Camp

Having taken four and a half
hours of actual movement to get up to Camp One, it took a little over an hour
to scamper back downhill unencumbered by luggage and with thicker air to
breathe with every downwards step. It
was snowing pretty steadily by the time I arrived back in base camp at 6:45,
just in time for the first decent meal that Akbar and his acolytes had provided
since we got to the mountain. That night
I managed to arrange something that had been bothering me since we had left
Bishkek. Our schedule for the trip had
changed by a day, meaning that we would arrive back in Bishkek in the afternoon
of Aug. 22nd, while my flight back to Switzerland was leaving that
same morning. I had tried unsuccessfully
to change my flight while I was in Bishkek (Turkish Airlines were
uncompromising: no change was possible
without buying a new ticket), but now Asia Mountains had arranged a taxi to
pick me up in Naryn on August 21st which would drive through the
night directly to Bishkek airport in time for my flight. I was relieved, and glad that on the Kyrgyz
side of the border Asia Mountains was on the ball.

I love the sweeping openness and rounded shapes of the Pamirs!

August 5th saw us head
uphill again to Camp One, this time to spend the night. I slept well, although it had taken a while
to fall asleep as my heart was racing again.
Eric slept less well, and was concerned that his body was not
acclimatizing at all. We had a leisurely
morning, waiting for some of the freshly fallen snow to melt on the trail, and
set off at 10. I felt much stronger and
quicker than I had the day before; maybe this time I would acclimatize more
successfully than on Peak Lenin? Eric
was very slow, with laboured breathing, and I waited for him a long time at our
lunch stop at 4900 metres, where we ate fried egg sandwiches. I powered ahead to Camp One ahead of Eric
after lunch, and arrived around 2:15, significantly quicker than the day
before. I set up the tent for the two of
us, sorted through the food and started cooking dinner. Enrico, our Austrian expedition mate, arrived
at 3:45, while Eric and Anna (Enrico’s girlfriend) arrived at 4:30. Eric was slow, but looked better than he had
in the morning; he said that setting his own pace and not trying to keep up
with me worked better for him. I cooked
up a storm: bouillon with ham and
butter, followed by potato puree with beans, tuna and olive oil. Eric wasn’t very hungry, but I ate a huge
feast, trying to avoid the weight loss that had plagued me on Peak Lenin. As we lay in the tent reading after dinner (I
was back to labouring through Proust), snug in our sleeping bags, snow began to
tickle the outside of the tent again. It
seemed to be a very snowy summer indeed!

Up at Camp One, after digging out a place for the tent

We both slept poorly that night
as our bodies struggled with the lack of atmospheric pressure up at 5350
metres. We awoke to continuing snow, and
stayed in the tent for much of the morning, hoping that it would stop. Enrico, in the neighbouring tent, had a
satellite phone (also forbidden to foreigners, but he had managed to smuggle it
through the border and past the base camp commander) that he used, among other
things, to get weather updates from his father back in Austria who was checking
Mountain-Forecast.com. We had seen
fairly promising weather forecasts down in base camp, but the latest from Austria
sounded grim: 5 or 6 days of fairly
steady snow and wind were now in the forecast.
We spent much of the day in the tent, emerging for a 45-minute sucker
hole of sunny weather to brew up tea and bouillon. As we reclined again in the tent, there was a
sudden loud “bang” from the roof of the tent.
I scrambled outside, thinking that a chunk of ice had slid down from
above and hit the tent, but I found nothing.
Looking more closely, I realized that one of the aluminum tent poles had
suddenly shattered. We disassembled the
tent in the snow and put on a spare length of reinforcing aluminum tubing
designed for precisely such an event, then re-erected the tent after
re-levelling the snow under the tent, which had been decidedly tilted the
previous night. Supper was mashed
potatoes and tuna, made pretty salty by some disappointing Russian bouillon
cubes. As I rinsed out a tea thermos, I
fumbled it and had it rocket downhill on the snow out of sight. I walked down after it, convinced that it
couldn’t be that hard to find a silver thermos on white snow, but I was wrong;
after 40 minutes of assiduous searching, I had to give up and retreat to the
tent to warm up in my sleeping bag and continue plodding through Proust,
wishing that he had hired a good editor.

An Unsatisfactory Break in Tashkurgan

I slept much better that night;
perhaps I was becoming acclimatized.
Eric didn’t sleep terribly well, as his intestines were in revolt. I was awoken a couple of times by howling
winds, but managed to fall asleep again.
We awoke on August 7th to cold and wind and yet more snow, so
we decided to move back down to base camp until the weather improved. After tea and muesli, we packed up slowly and
headed back down the mountain. I skied
down to the edge of the snowline and stashed my skis, but Eric’s new Dynafit
bindings gave him so much trouble trying to put his skis on that in the end he
gave up, left the skis at the tent and walked down across the snow. It marked my first turns on Muztagh Ata, and
the snow was deep and soft and surprisingly unslabby, given the winds we had
had. When Eric reached me, we set off on
foot back towards base camp. It was a
setback, but at least we had more time for bad weather intervals than I had had
on Peak Lenin. By 1:30 we had trudged
back into base camp, in time for another unsatisfying lunch. The afternoon passed in a rapid series of
weather changes: several sunny patches
(at least in base camp; the summit remained wreathed in cloud) with a huge
hailstorm and a couple of snow squalls inbetween. I sat around reading: I was giving Proust a rest, and re-reading
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s masterpiece of travel writing A Time of Gifts at great
speed, relieved to be free of Proust’s meanderings. We caught up with Olympics news as well from
new arrivals and from our phones: Usain
Bolt had won the 100 metres dash again, but Roger Federer had lost unexpectedly
to Andy Murray in the tennis final. We
were in bed early to beat the cold that had descended after the final
snowstorm.

The view from the Tagh Arma Pass back in 1998

Wednesday, August 8th,
with more poor weather forecast on the mountain, Eric and I decided to take a
day away from the mountain. We awoke
from our best night of sleep yet, stuck our heads out of the tent and found 15
cm of fresh snow on the ground; we had both slept so deeply for once that we
hadn’t even heard the snow falling. The
light was lovely, and I scampered around taking photos, but it was clearly not
a day to be heading back up the mountain.
We had a good breakfast for once and then hopped in a jeep that took us
down to the road at Subashi in what my diary records as “a horrific bumpathon”. We transferred there to a modern, smooth,
fast Toyota Hi-Lux for the drive to Tashkurgan, a place that both Eric and I
remembered as a charming town of mud-brick buildings and a crumbling medieval
fort. We were keen to achieve three
things in town: check our e-mail, have a
massive, tasty lunch and soak in the hot springs outside town.

The first sign that things were going
to go a bit pear-shaped came as we approached the outskirts of Tashkurgan. The Chinese have installed security video cameras
over the highway, and our driver casually drove into the other lane of traffic
to avoid the first one. We asked him
why, and it turned out that he didn’t have the proper permit to transport
foreign tourists. The next camera, a
couple of kilometres later, was unavoidable because of a central median, and
our driver pulled over just before it and called a taxi driver friend of his to
come pick us up. It felt farcical,
especially since his friend was so slow in arriving that we could have walked
to town more quickly. We finally made it
into town and were both open-mouthed in amazement. Gone was the small outpost of adobe
buildings. In its place had arisen a big
new Chinese instant city of concrete and bathroom tiles, at least ten times the
size that I remembered from before. Most
of the faces in the street were Han Chinese, new settlers brought in from the
east. There were still Tajik and Kyrgyz
faces to be seen, though, with distinctive sandy hair and green eyes that
looked about 4000 km out of place, as though a colony of Scots and Hungarians
had been dropped in this remote spot.
The Tajik women wore colourful, elaborate costumes and distinctive
pillbox hats.

We found a few ATMs to restock
our supply of Chinese yuan, but our internet dreams foundered on the rock of
Chinese government paranoia. Our driver
asked around for an internet joint, and led us to an unmarked door in a
semi-derelict building of epic filth and dilapidation. We made our way upstairs to a room where
dozens of computers were in use. Our Uighur
driver asked the boss, a slovenly Chinese man with a cigarette and a pot belly
sticking out below his dirty undershirt, and was told dismissively that “there
is no internet”. Given that all the
clients were on the internet, this seemed unlikely and we pressed the
case. It turned out that foreigners
weren’t allowed to use the internet by some government regulation. The boss waved his hand at us in a gesture of
contemptuous dismissal and shuffled off, leaving us frustrated. We made a grocery run, picking up some
delicious fresh flat Central Asian bread, toilet paper, a new phone battery for
me and some beer. Eric and I walked the
streets, shaking our heads at the changes and at the Han Chinese attitude of
contempt for the local inhabitants, uncomfortably reminiscent for me of white
Canadian attitudes to our own First Nations peoples. The main street was wide and brand new, with
a bombastic cultural centre and a gaudy brothel the main features, and felt
utterly unlike the sleepy village I had rather enjoyed back in 1998.

Eric and I on the Tagh Arma Pass in 2012. The mountains haven't changed.

We set off for the hot springs,
via another taxi-swap delay. We found a
Soviet-style sanatorium of considerable grim and wear; as my sister Audie once
said in 1998 of Chinese bathrooms in general “4000 years of advanced
civilization doesn’t get you a clean toilet”.
We paid 60 yuan (about US $ 10) each for a soak in a wooden bathtub
lined with a 5 yuan plastic bag. It was
great to get clean after a week without bathing, but I would have to rate Tashkurgan
pretty low on the list of great hot springs of the world. There wasn’t even a decent restaurant for a
big lunch. We left at 3:00 to head back
to base camp, pretty unsatisfied with our big day out. On the way back our taxi driver had to take a
back road across the Tagh Arma basin to dodge a police checkpoint, and we
ignored a Chinese cop on a bus who was trying to flag us down out of the bus
window. We stopped for photos at the Tagh Arma pass between Tashkurgan and Muztagh Ata where a glorious sun-soaked panorama
awaited us, with Kongur and Muztagh Ata gleaming high and white above the pastel
shades of the grasslands below and the azure waters of Lake Karakul. By 6:00 we were back in base camp, basking in
glorious golden late-afternoon light and drinking some of our beer.

Supper was late, scanty and
unappetizing when Akbar, our camp manager, finally brought it in. Eric works as a consultant around the world,
evaluating medical aid programs, and as such spends his time looking for money
that’s spent fraudulently or inefficiently, or just pocketed. His professional antennas were immediately up
as soon as he met Akbar; as he said “I spend my life dealing with pricks like
him, and I know he is stealing most of the money that Asia Mountains pays him
for our food.” And it was true that our
base camp meals were scanty, miserable affairs, slow in delivery, cheap in
execution and not what hungry mountaineers needed to keep up our strength. Even the little things, like wiping the
dining room table clean or clearing away dirty dishes, were beneath Akbar, and
the few times we had gone to find him in the cook tent, we found him feasting
on far better fare than we were served.
The contrast with Asia Mountain’s base camp and Camp One on Peak Lenin
was extreme, and it was all because Asia Mountains legally had to employ a
Chinese company to provide local services.
I heard a story that Igor, the tough Ukrainian mountain guide who was
overseeing Asia Mountains clients on Muztagh Ata, had gotten so frustrated the
week before our arrival with Akbar that he had chased him around the camp with
an ice axe, hoping to scare him into doing his job. It obviously hadn’t worked, but I wished I
had been there to witness it.

The Second Round: Climbing Solo

Wonderful light seen from Camp One

That night neither Eric nor I
slept at all well. I woke up at 3:00 am and
could barely sleep afterwards. Eric was
much worse, with his heart pounding and an unsettling tightness in his
chest. As a doctor, Eric was aware that
this sort of feeling was not A Good Thing, and he was worried about not just
not acclimatizing, but even having a heart attack. We had both talked about my friend Roger Payne’s deatha lot in the past few days, and Eric wasn’t keen on dying in the mountains and
leaving a wife and two kids fatherless. It
was gloriously sunny and warm and we were planning to head back up the mountain
again to take advantage of the weather window.
I made my morning pilgrimage to the awful latrine enclosure and left my
Gore Tex jacket lying on a rock outside.
When I emerged, it was gone. I
hunted around, but it had clearly been taken, probably by some of the dodgy
local youths who loitered around the camp hoping for work as porters. I asked around among the various Uighur camp
managers and was greeted with supreme unhelpfulness and shrugs of the
shoulders. After three quarters of an
hour of this dumb show, I wandered off to the Chinese camp manager, the same stern
military man who had arrested the Lithuanians, to see what he could do. I was admitted into the presence of the great
man and explained my predicament. He
issued brief orders in Chinese and sent a couple of minions out into the
camp. It took less than three minutes
before my jacket was restored to me, and I thanked him before heading back to
our tent, resolving never to leave anything lying out of sight again.

Anna soaking up rays in Camp One during a rare sunny spell

By 11:00 Eric and I were loaded
up and ready to head back up the mountain.
Eric was immediately in distress, hardly able to breathe. By the time we had made 100 vertical metres,
he had made a decision. Since he was not
only not acclimatizing but getting worse, with heart and breathing problems, he
was pulling the plug. We said goodbye
and he descended painfully back to base camp to start making arrangements for
an early return to Bishkek with a previous Asia Mountains group. His skis and some of his gear were up at Camp
One, so a porter would have to come up and pick them up soon. I watched him descend, sad that our joint
expedition was coming to an end, but confident that he had made the right
decision for himself (and maybe, in retrospect, I should have followed his
lead). I continued up to Camp One,
feeling pretty fit and acclimatized for once, arriving at 3:00 pm, meaning that
I had taken a little over three hours of walking, not counting a leisurely
lunch stop. I spent some time digging
out my tent from the past few days of snow, then cooked up a big supper and
chatted to Enrico and Anna before retreating into my tent before sunset to beat
the cold. I slept well, and was glad
that I seemed to be acclimatizing much better to altitude than I had done on
Peak Lenin.

Me on my way up to Camp Two (photo: Enrico Schirmer)

Friday August 10th
found me up at 8:00 and on the phone with Eric and with Akbar, trying to get a
porter sent up to get Eric’s luggage and skis, which I left packed neatly for
pickup. I then had breakfast and packed
up my own tent and left at the ridiculously late hour of 11:15 to skin up to
Camp Two. It was a long, slow slog with
all my gear, through swirling fog and cloud.
The first 250 vertical metres went pretty quickly, but the next 250 metres
seemed to take forever as I negotiated a passage through crevasses in the underlying
glacier I recovered a bit on the final 170 metres. I stopped along the way for a couple of snack
stops, as well as chatting with Igor, on his way downhill after summitting the
day before with some of the previous Asia Mountains clients. By 3:45 pm I had arrived at Camp 2, a
scattering of tents at 6020 metres. It
took ages to find an empty tent platform (but less time than it would have
taken to dig a new one!) and set up my tent.
I felt a bit dehydrated, but after soup and tea I felt a bit
better. The skies had cleared and I
cooked outside, making a delicious pack of dehydrated chicken curry, watching a
beautiful sunset. In a reminder of how
small and well-connected the 21st century world is, my cell phone
rang after supper and I had a conversation with my mother, calling from
Ottawa. It was good to hear her voice.

Having talked with Anna and
Enrico, with whom I was now teaming up a bit in the absence of Eric, I knew
that different weather forecasts were contradicting each other. Plan A, dependent on a two-day window of
clear weather, was to take a rest day in Camp One and then do a long summit
push on August 12th all the way from Camp Two. I didn’t really feel like packing up my tent
again to make camp higher up the mountain, and I hoped that I would be
acclimatized and fit enough to do 1400 vertical metres in one big day.

The next day, August 11th,
Enrico and Anna and I tried to acclimatize a bit by skinning up towards Camp
2+, a couple of hundred metres above us, but we were turned back quite quickly
by fog and snow. I felt very fit and
acclimatized, and the ski back down was fun, perhaps the most enjoyable part of
the entire Muztagh Ata expedition. We
settled into our tents to eat, sleep and read as the snow fell, increasingly
heavily,

with the occasional clear patch to taunt us.

My tent at Camp Two, seen from Enrico and Anna's (photo: Enrico Schirmer)

We woke up on August 12th
to incessant heavy snow, thunder and lightning.
I got out of my tent a few times to shovel snow off so that I wouldn’t get
buried and could still breathe. I could
feel my shovel and my jacket both buzzing with what my sister Audie calls “les
abeilles”, the bees, as static electricity builds up. I was concerned about being hit by lightning
and was glad when the lightning finally abated.
The day passed slowly, and the night was miserable, as I came down with
a headache, possibly from lack of ventilation.
I got up in the middle of the night to shovel snow again, then got up
again at 4:00 am to check the weather.
Enrico, Anna and I had agreed to make a summit bid that morning if the
skies were clear, but instead snow was belting down, driven horizontally by
howling winds. We shouted to each other
across the wind, confirming that we weren’t going anywhere uphill, and went
back to bed. I got up feeling like
death: tired, with a headache and no
inclination to spend another stormy night in the tent. Enrico also felt bad, so we decided to
descend for a night of recovery in base camp, leaving our tents up.

I set off first at 10:30 with a
pair of Polish female climbers, Agnieszka and Jana, hoping that we could keep
an eye on each other through the crevasse field, but they were so agonizingly
slow (they were on snowshoes, not skis) that I got cold waiting for them and
decided to ski down on my own. I made it
through the crevasse field, finding the safe snow bridges that I had tried to
memorize on the way up, and then ran into a complete whiteout. I took it very slowly, trying to follow the
ascent tracks as best I could. I was so
relieved to make it to Camp One unscathed that I celebrated by falling
spectacularly in the whiteout. I was
unhurt, but I took it a bit slower from that point onwards. I emptied my cache of spare fuel and food
from Camp One and put it in my pack to take back down to base camp; with Eric
gone, I needed only half as much as I had planned for. I stashed my skis at the ski line again,
along with my ski boots, put on my hiking boots and raced down the track. I noticed that the snow line had descended
noticeably down the mountain since the first time we had come up, what with all
the fresh snow. The fact that the snow
line was getting lower in the middle of what should have been the hottest month
of summer was not comforting!

Wind flag over the summit of Il Pannetone

I was back in base camp by 1:30
(descending on skis certainly saved a lot of time and energy!) and found Igor
there, looking deeply depressed. He had
checked his e-mail and learned that Dasha Yashina, the glamorous mountain guide
I had met a few weeks earlier on Peak Lenin, had died a few days earlier falling
through a cornice on Pik Pobedy (Victory Peak), another of the Snow Leopard
peaks in Kyrgyzstan. It was a summer of
close encounters with death in the mountains, and Dasha’s death made me more
resolved to be as safe as I could be in my decision-making. I chatted with other climbers in base camp,
relieved not to be huddled in my tiny tent in a snowstorm, and then had a
wonderfully relaxed Akbar-less supper with Enrico and Anna, who had arrived
later that afternoon. Eric had departed
the day before, and I was alone in the base camp tent, free to sprawl all over
the tent.

Tuesday, August 14th
found us campbound again. I had slept
very deeply, but had awoken at 3:30 am and had spent the rest of the night
reading Montaigne in my sleeping bag. It
was still snowing, and the snow kept up for most of the day. I lazed in my tent and chatted with Terri on
the phone. We were running out of days
on the mountain; we were leaving base camp on August 19th, and with
all the snow we had had, we had only a couple of days left for potential summit
bids. Terri begged me not to do anything
foolish in pursuit of the summit, and I agreed.
We had a delicious lunch of pasta, the best lunch we had had since our
arrival, and the weather finally cleared in the afternoon, letting me sit out
in the sun reading and even get in a bit of much-needed laundry. It started raining at 5:30, sending me
scuttling back inside. The rain rapidly
turned to driving snow. Snow or shine,
Enrico, Anna and I were committed to heading uphill the next day, making one
last attempt to get to the summit.

The Final Failure

My tent buried in the snow at Camp Two. The expedition in microcosm

Wednesday, August 15th
found me up at 7:30 am after a deep sleep interrupted by the terrifying noise
of rockfall close to camp. It
sounded as though rocks were about to land right on my tent, and I leapt up to
see what was going on. It was actually a
fair distance away, but it got my heart pounding. Enrico and Anna were already on their way by
the time I got going at 9:10. I charged
uphill, feeling good, and caught up to them by the time I got to the former
snowline at 11:00 (the hiking path was under snow for quite a distance below
that!). I put on my skis and skins and
continued up to Camp One, getting there by 12:15. After a snack break I set off again
uphill. I was breaking trail through
quite deep snow, and it was physically hard work. There was a lot of fog and wind as I picked
my way gingerly through the crevasses, glad for the bamboo poles that someone
had erected to keep people on the safe path.
I was going pretty slowly, but I was still faster than anyone else other
than a party of three Spaniards on snowshoes.
I got to Camp Two by 5:45 and could barely see my tent; only the very
tip of the roof protruded above a deep covering of new snow. It took an hour and a half of hard shovelling
to excavate it, but by 7:15 I was wrestling with my stove: my matches weren’t lighting, and my lighter
didn’t work. Luckily Enrico and Anna had
arrived and I borrowed a lighter from them.
I cooked up a feast of noodles and dehy, and contemplated how I
felt. I was a bit sunburnt (or
windburnt), and I felt a touch of snowblindness, despite wearing my ski
goggles. I was pretty tired after a
long, hard day of trail-breaking, and looking uphill I didn’t see a single
track, which meant that it was going to be hard work to get higher up. I was going to need allies to co-operate in the
task ahead.

Thursday, August 16th
was a disappointing day. I slept until
10:00 am, tired from the previous day’s exertions. We awoke (of course) to snow and wind, and
Enrico, Anna and I were resigned to the prospect of another enforced rest
day. At 12:30 though the sky cleared and
a bunch of climbers came through from below, including a big group of Austrians
and Germans from an outfit called the Summit Club, led by two mountain
guides. I decided that we should take
advantage of the trail-breaking services and started to pack up. Before I got started, though, I got a request
on the phone from below to dig out another tent. Volodya, a Russian climber, had left his tent
standing at Camp Two for Afto and his Georgian friend to use, but Afto wasn’t
coming up the mountain again either, having given up, so now Volodya’s tent was
abandoned at Camp Two. I agreed to dig
it out and pack it up so that a porter could come up and collect it. It was surprisingly hard work (it was even
more buried than mine had been) and I was somewhat annoyed that I was tidying
up someone else’s mess, but by 3:00 pm I had packed up his tent and my own and
started the climb up to Camp Three, trying to make use of the break in the
weather. I was slow and out of breath,
feeling every kilogram on my back and on my feet. I didn’t catch up to anyone, but at least
there was a decent well-trodden track to follow. I got up to Camp Three, a forlorn collection
of tents at 6500 m, by 5:45, under cloudy, threatening skies, the sun having
vanished not long after I left camp. I
felt worn out and took ages to set up camp.
My camp neighbours, a French group, gave me a delicious gift of
pastrami, which served as an appetizer to some slightly soupy dehydrated stroganoff. I had more appetite than I had had the night
before, which was a promising sign. It
was significantly cold in the tent, and I broke out one of the chemical
toe-warmers that Terri had left me to keep my tootsies warm in the sleeping
bag.

Just as I was settling into my
sleeping bag, hoping for clear weather in the morning for a summit bid, my cell
phone rang. It was Igor, and he wanted
to know if I saw anything unusual going on in camp. I stuck my head out of my tent and looked
around; everything looked normal, I reported.
Igor told me that he had heard that a dead body had been found in Camp
Three, of a Polish man who had stayed in Camp Three a few days ago when
everybody else had retreated. A team of
porters was being sent up the next day to collect the body. It was another grim reminder of how things could
go badly on high mountains, and something to think about as I tried to get some
sleep for our last possible try on the summit the next day. The latest weather forecast called for
clearing skies at daybreak, and we set our alarms for a 6:30 am departure.

I woke up at 5:15 to the sound of
snow; yet another supposed weather window turned out to be a meteorological
mirage. I was about to give up and fall
back asleep when I heard the Summit Club expedition head past with their
headlamps on. I got myself ready, keen
to follow in their tracks. I felt like
death, with a headache, dry mouth and little appetite; this was by far the
highest altitude I had ever slept at, and it had been rough on my body. I forced down some muesli and tea, but the
last mouthful of tea was too much for my body, and suddenly I was on my knees
in the vestibule vomiting. I cleaned
myself up as best I could, but it was hardly an auspicious start to
proceedings.

At 7:30 I set off into the fog,
ahead of Enrico and Anna but behind the French.
The visibility was awful, and I was moving too slowly, averaging only 150
vertical metres per hour; at that rate it would take 7 hours to summit, and I
was bound to get slower as I got higher.
My fingers felt cold despite my heavy mountaineering mitts, rated to -40
degrees. I had never had serious
problems with cold fingers in all my mountaineering and skiing experiences, and
I was worried. I tossed in chemical
hand-warmers and kept going. I was
moving terribly slowly: I would count 15
strides on my skis, then stop for 30 gasping breaths. I felt tired, slow, weak and
unmotivated. The weather wasn’t
improving either. By 10:00 I had had
enough; I was clearly not strong enough to make it, and I was leery of going
higher into the complete whiteout in case I got lost. My altimeter said that I was at 6840 m, only
350 metres above Camp Three and still 700 metres below the summit. I sat down in the snow and caught my breath. Anna and Enrico had come to the same
conclusion, and sat down some distance away.
I tore off my climbing skins, locked down my heels and shouted over that
I was headed back down. They said that they
would follow me shortly; I found out afterwards that Enrico was in the midst of
proposing to Anna. He had planned to ask
her at the summit, but this, the highest point of the climb, would have to
do.

Skiing back down from Camp Two after giving up on the summit

At first I slid slowly down the
up track, unable to see five metres in front of me. After a while, though, I popped out into
clear visibility and carved some satisfying wide GS turns in the snow, back to
the tent. I packed up as quickly as I
could and set off downhill, hoping for a fun run down to the edge of the snow
line, despite the heavy pack on my back.
Alas, it was not to be. I had a
fun swoosh down to Camp Two, but then I hit the densest pea-soup fog of the
entire expedition, right where I needed it least, crossing the crevasse
field. It was seriously scary trying to
get through the crevasses, unable to see anything and aware from previous trips
how many death traps there were all around me.
I actually sat down for 20 minutes at one point, hoping for other people
to pass by or for the fog to lift a bit.
It suddenly started to get quite warm and I was aware of how thirsty I
was. I skidded slowly and carefully down
the ascending track until I was clear of the crevasses, then made a few turns
back and forth across the track until I got to Camp One. The sun made a sudden, unexpected appearance
and I flew down the final few turns until I ran out of snow. By 3:45 I was donning my hiking boots and
strapping my skis and ski boots to the outside of the pack. It was a heavy but quick trudge down to base
camp, and by 4:45 I was back in base camp, unpacking wet gear in a steady
drizzle. The weather really was starting
to drive me nuts, and I was glad to be off the mountain for good. I chatted with various other climbing groups,
especially a bunch of Slovenians who had just arrived, and then settled into
supper and celebratory beers with Anna and Enrico, who had just arrived in
their newly engaged state. I slept in
Igor’s empty tent that night just to be further from the scary rockfall that
had disturbed my sleep the last time I was in base camp.

The Long Farewell

The rest of the expedition was a never-ending
gong show, a sad anti-climax to what had been an anti-climactic climbing
season. I spent Saturday, August 18th
lazing around base camp in an orgy of sloth and lassitude. I was actually keen to get going, but we had
to wait for everyone to be down the mountains.
I had also heard that the Chinese government had suddenly and
inexplicably decided to honour the Muslim holiday of Eid el Fitr by closing the
Torugart Pass for three days so that the Muslim border guards could have a
holiday. Those three days, of course,
included the day that we were scheduled to cross, so we could either hurry up
and try to cross a day early, or wait two days in Kashgar. In the end the call from head office was that
we would cross the border later, rather than earlier. This meant that I would definitely miss my
flight in Bishkek, which meant that I would have to buy a new Turkish Airlines
ticket to get back to Switzerland. I was
not amused, and frankly baffled why a Chinese government hostile to religion in
general and Uighur Muslims in general would suddenly decide to be religiously
sensitive, and why they hadn’t let anyone know until a few days
beforehand.

I slept strangely, with intense
dreams and heavy, laboured breathing punctuated by waking up to spasms in my
leg muscles. I guess it was my need for
oxygen in my exhausted muscles overwhelming the thin air available in base
camp. My gums and the roof of my mouth were sore too, and I wondered if I had sunburnt them on the last day, as was the case for my poor, tenderized lips.

Enrico and Sergey at Kashgar Night Market

The next day, Sunday, August 19th
was a day of comical ineptitude. We had
packed up our skis, our tents and all our gear the day before, and were ready
for Akbar to arrange a lift for our gear down the mountain. Instead he sneaked off early in the morning,
grabbing lift with the Summit Club climbers (who had summited the day I turned
around, climbing on through the fog using 2 GPSes; they had seen nothing at the
summit, and had come perilously close to skiing off a cliff en route) and
escaping to Kashgar, leaving us Asia Mountains folks to fend for
ourselves. Igor was incensed, but not
surprised. It was the first day of Eid,
and the Uighur drivers just wanted to get home to celebrate with their
families. In the end another expedition
company took pity on us and found us transport for our gear while we walked
down to Subashi. Akbar had taken off
hours before, but we managed, eventually, to find a lift to Kashgar courtesy of
another mountaineering outfit. It was a
final middle finger from Akbar, the man Eric had so quickly and accurately
diagnosed as a thief and a prick. By
now, with the early departure of the Georgians, Eric and a couple of other
climbers, our party was only myself, Enrico, Anna, Sergey, his friend and Igor.
We got back to the Xinde Hotel by 7:15 pm and went out to the Kashgar Night
Market for a huge celebratory feast of lots of kebabs and even more draft
beer. It was release from the endless
frustration of the horrible weather and interacting with the unspeakable Akbar,
and we got fairly merry by the time we headed back to the hotel.

Igor and I after a few kebabs and more than a few beers at Kashgar Night Market

The border was definitely closed,
so we had two days to kill in Kashgar.
The Summit Club expedition was staying at our hotel, and we exchanged
different ideas on how to get back to Bishkek to catch our flights. It was possible to fly from Kashgar to
Urumqi, and then on to Bishkek, but the cost was 600 euros, with something like
300 euros for excess baggage. I opted
for a new Turkish Airlines ticket instead for 950 euros; it took almost 2 hours
on Skype to get it all done. A day of
poking around the new sterilized tourist version of the old city of Kashgar and
eating a monstrous lunch was followed by another raucous night at the Night
Market, this time with the Austrians from Summit Club, ending with us sitting
up very, very late in the hotel lobby with beer, whiskey and mountaineering
stories. The Austrians had dubbed me “Young
Messner” because of my unruly hair and beard; you be the judge.

The real Reinhold Messner

On Tuesday I slept until noon,
then went out with Igor and another Russian mountain guide to lunch at the
Altun Orde restaurant, where we ate well and drank some of the best tea I had
ever had; the other guide was a tea connoisseur and we lingered over numerous
pots of spiced, scented green and black teas late into the afternoon. It felt finally as though I was back on the
Silk Road for the first time since finishing my Silk Road bike trip three years
before, and seemed a fitting end to the expedition.

Elderly man, Kashgar, 1998

Wednesday, August 22nd
was an endurance fest of bad roads and incompetence (on the Chinese side of the
border, anyway). We drove straight
through to Bishkek instead of stopping in Naryn, as we all had flights to
catch, and didn’t get back to the Asia Mountains guesthouse until after midnight. I was relieved to get out of China and the oppressive paranoia of the government. I have spent a lot of time in remote corners of China in the past (1998, 2001, 2002, 2004) and, since I was always on my bicycle, I was able to avoid the worst of the Chinese government's control-freakery, but this year was much worse. A final morning of last-minute errands
(reconfirming my ticket, getting rid of excess Chinese yuan and Kyrgyz som,
buying much-needed dental floss) and then I was at the airport, ready to leave
behind Central Asia for now, and big mountain summits forever.

Kashgar, 1998

Overall, my experiences over the
summer had been a very mixed bag. I had
loved trekking in Ladakh with Terri in June, but Peak Lenin had been physically
exhausting and hampered by bad weather.
Trekking with Eric had been fun, but his twisted ankle had unfortunately
shortened that trip. I had given my best
on Muztagh Ata, and had had a chance to summit, but the endless waiting for
good weather had been psychologically draining and not the most fun use I could
have put those 23 days to. Had I had a
crystal ball, I would have skipped both Peak Lenin and Muztagh Ata and just
spent those 7 weeks doing more trekking in India and Kyrgyzstan instead. On the other hand, as my mountaineer friend
Sion says, “If you don’t go, you won’t know!”
I had gone, and now I knew. Now
it was time for a reunion with Terri and a return to teaching in Leysin, a day
late, my beard making me look vaguely like a Taliban. Ironically, after not acclimatizing at all
well on either peak, I returned to Leysin with my red blood count up so high
that I was soon setting personal bests on my bicycle on all our local
climbs. Maybe high altitude was good for
something, if not for reaching summits?

Monday, May 8, 2017

This post may mark an all-time record for me in terms of not writing up my adventures at the time, and letting things slide. It's been almost 5 years since I spent six weeks trying to live out my Reinhold Messner mountaineering fantasies in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, and only now am I finally sitting down to try to capture the experience in cyberspace. The fact that I have now written something like 49 blog posts since I left Leysin in June of 2015 means that I can no longer be tagged with my friend Kent Foster's once-accurate label of "the world's laziest blogger", but there is still improvement to be made, including writing about adventures that happened during the five-year-long blur of working in Leysin. I really enjoyed living in the Alps (even if there were only 2 good snow winters out of the 5 I spent there), but between teaching, sports and travel, I hardly had time to put fingers to keyboard in the service of travel writing. I am trying belatedly to make up for lost time.

In the summer of 2012, after a wonderful month spent hiking in the high-altitude trekker's paradise of Ladakh with Terri, we went our separate ways; she to return to work at her school in Leysin, me to further adventures in Kyrgyzstan and China; having two and a half months off every summer was one of the biggest perks of teaching at LAS! I had first planned to climb Peak Lenin, reputedly the easiest 7000-metre peak in the world, back in 2002 during my Silk Road bike ride. I was going to meet up with my sisters Audie and Saakje in Kyrgyzstan for another XTreme Dorks adventure, but an attack of rheumatic fever that laid me low for 6 months put the kibosh on further riding or any thoughts of mountaineering. A decade further on, after a couple of seasons of ski touring in the Alps, I thought I would be in as good shape as I would ever be in for mountaineering, especially after a month of acclimatization in Ladakh. Once I had decided to try my luck on Peak Lenin, it was easy to tack on another mountain that had been on my mental radar for 14 years, since my bike ride (the original XTreme Dorks expedition) along the Karakoram Highway way back in 1998. Muztagh Ata is a huge peak (at 7546 m it's 400 m higher than Peak Lenin), but it's a deceptively simple-looking snow ramp that looks relatively simple to climb. My friend Eric, with whom I used to play tennis back in Yangon days, had also been thinking of Muztagh Ata and we decided to do an expedition together. I had about seven weeks before I had to get back to Leysin for the start of the school year, and it seemed like exactly the right amount of time for two big peaks.

The various climbing routes; I was on route 2, the Normal Route

In the end, I decided to pay Asia Mountains, a well-regarded company based in Bishkek, to provide base camp services on Peak Lenin, and to do the same for both of us at Muztagh Ata. It's not strictly speaking necessary to hire a company for Peak Lenin, but almost everyone ends up doing so, since security of your possessions can be an issue there, and it's also nice to have some good food and comfort at base camp before and after being up on the slopes of the mountain. On Muztagh Ata, given the Chinese government's bureaucracy, paranoia and obsession with border security, it's obligatory (and much more expensive!).

The flight from Delhi to Bishkek took forever, as I was flying on Turkish Airlines and flew all the way back to Istanbul only to backtrack the same distance east again. I got to Bishkek, dropped off my skis with Alyona from Asia Mountains (they were storing them until I needed them for Muztagh Ata), hopped on a domestic flight to Osh and was picked up at the airport by a car and driver from Asia Mountains. We stopped off in town for me to buy food at the supermarket and pick up a stove and gas canisters at the Asia Mountains office, then headed into the mountains. It took four hours to drive to the base camp for Peak Lenin, a bit faster than the three days it took me on a bicycle back in 2004. In the intervening eight years, the Chinese had paved the road, so that what was once a rutted dirt track was now almost entirely smooth asphalt. It's a spectacular drive, up a long valley from Osh, then up and over the hairpins of the 3615-metre Taldyk Pass where my cycling partner Antoine and I once had to hole up in a yurt overnight during a howling blizzard. It was beautiful sunny weather this time and we swept steeply downhill to the crossroads town of Sary Tash, where roads lead east to China over the Irkeshtam Pass, west to Dushanbe (Tajikistan) and south to the Pamir Highway through eastern Tajikistan. Antoine and I had headed south back in 2004, but we had stopped and looked southwest longingly towards the huge white shape of Peak Lenin. This year the vehicle turned west for thirty kilometres before leaving the main road and bumping along a jeep track for an hour up a green and pleasant valley to Asia Mountains' base camp, which was to be my home away from home for the next two weeks.

I had last been atop a really
high mountain peak back in 2001 with my sisters Audie and Saakje and their
respective partners Serge and Lucas, on one of our XTreme Dorks
adventures. That year, after hiking the
Inca Trail in Peru and spending time on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia,
followed by more hiking in the altiplano in Chile, we had climbed Aconcagua,
the highest peak in South America. At
6961 metres, it was less than 200 metres shorter than Peak Lenin, so I assumed
that with similar acclimatization, I would be able to use a similar approach to
climbing Peak Lenin. Back then we had
hiked in for two days from the road at Puente del Inca to the base camp at
Plaza de Mulas, then ascended slowly to Camps One and Two (Canada and Nido de Condores),
pausing to acclimatize at each camp for a couple of days while ferrying
supplies further up the mountain.
Finally we did a big day to summit from Nido, doing about 1000 vertical
metres, before returning to camp. I
envisioned a similar slow ascent on Peak Lenin, starting with ferrying gear to
Camp One (Advanced Base Camp), staying there, then ferrying gear up to Camp Two
and Camp Three before a summit dash from Camp Three. I had my mountaineering tent, sleeping bag
and mattress, plenty of food (including freeze-dried rations and some bacon,
cheese, soup and noodles I had bought in Osh), fuel (small camping cylinders),
cooking gear and a Kindle. I felt ready!

Marmot near Peak Lenin Base Camp

There are a series of widely
spaced base camps spread along the Achik Tash meadows at about 3650 metres
above sea level, each run by a different mountaineering company. You don’t absolutely need to stay in one of
them, but they’re relatively inexpensive and provide a measure of security
against pilfering. Asia Mountains had a
neat encampment of yurts at the foot of an old glacial moraine with a splendid
view of the mountain and the rest of the Trans-Alai range, and plenty of marmots
running around. I was put in my own big
orange half-cylinder tent and soon afterwards repaired to the dining tent to
eat sumptuously. This is the other
advantage of using a base camp outfit like Asia Mountains: at Base Camp and Camp One there are full-time
professional cooks preparing meals that aren’t dehydrated noodles and
soups. I settled in for a great feed,
and then packed my gear for an early departure the next morning.

There were a number of groups at
base camp that night. There were 3
Muscovites (Nastya, Irina and Volodya) who were climbing together, and a group
of 8 Slovenians, including a professional mountain guide named Branko. As well there was a young Spanish
snowboarder, Marcos, who was keen to make a snowboard descent of the mountain,
but who was suffering from persistent dysentery and off to Osh to see a
doctor. I would see a lot of these folks
over the next two weeks, and it was good to meet such a fun group of travellers
and mountaineers.

How other expeditions move gear to Camp One

The next day, Thursday July 5th,
was a long, tough day. My idea was to
shuttle a load to Camp 1 to get my body used to carrying a heavy load, and to
use the old acclimatization adage of “climb high, sleep low”. I was up by 7 am, breakfasting at 8 (on a
delicious spread of eggs, bread, yoghurt, jam and other goodies in the mess
tent) and underway by 9. My pack was
really, really heavy, maybe as much as 30 kg, and it was hard going. I had been told that it was a 4-hour hike to
Camp 1, but it ended up taking almost 6 hours.
The heavy pack was definitely a factor in slowing me down (I could have
hired a horse to take my gear there, but I thought it was a better idea to get
some carrying into my legs, after a month of having horses carry my gear in
Ladakh), but I seemed to be ridiculously unacclimatized to altitude. This was quite strange, as I had spent most
of the previous month above 4000 metres in Ladakh and had been completely
acclimatized to that altitude. I found
myself really panting for breath on uphills.
I also, because I underestimated the time, didn’t have enough snack food
and water with me.

Between Base Camp and Camp One; Camp One is up the glacier to the right

The path led up the valley that
the base camp was located in, through carpets of beautiful wildflowers, and
then through gorgeous Onion Meadow (full, unsurprisingly, of wild onions with
their pretty purple flowers). I then
left the valley and the greenery and made my way up a ridge of red rock to the
top of Traveller’s Pass, topping out at 11:15.
There was a sweeping view out into the next valley (in which Camp One is
located), and at the top I met a garrulous, enthusiastic retired Englishman
with whom I chatted about trekking and mountains for an enjoyable (but windy)
half hour. I thought that I was close to
Camp One, but it was another three hours of tough walking, often up and down
across steep moraine scree slopes. I was
getting hungrier and thirstier (there was no water after I left Onion Meadow)
and puzzled as to where Camp One might be.
I was almost on top of it before it appeared, a series of
widely-scattered tents clusters at 4400 metres above sea level, one for each
mountaineering company. At 2:40 pm,
leg-weary, surprisingly tired and very hungry, I got to the Asia Mountains camp
(the closest one, luckily), dropped my load and tucked into a magnificent lunch
in the mess tent. While eating, I met
three more skiers, companions of the ill snowboarder Marcos. I was starting to wonder whether I should
have brought my skis to Peak Lenin too, but it seemed to be a long trudge
before skis could become useful. I was
shown to my small tent, where I stashed my gear before setting off back to base
camp at a much more rapid rate, passing dozens of fat orange marmots in Onion
Meadow. By 7 pm I was back at base camp,
just in time for another huge feast. My
calves felt empty and sore, and my left ankle wasn’t at all happy. I went to bed tired but also worried about my
lack of acclimatization and the excessive weight of food and supplies that I
was lugging around.

Scenery between base camp and Camp One

That night I slept fitfully, as
though unacclimatized to 3700 metres. In
the morning, I packed up the remainder of my gear (substantially lighter this time)
and set off at 9:00 again. The weather
was cloudier, colder and windier than the day before, with a few fitful
snowflakes, and I walked slowly but steadily, taking a snack break below the
Traveller’s Pass. I felt a bit fitter
than the day before, but it still took me until 2:40 pm to get to Camp One,
exactly the same time as the day before.
I tucked into another sizeable feed before sorting out my gear, trying
to reduce weight for the following day.
The rest of the afternoon passed agreeably reading and napping in my
tent. The weather was ominous, with
heavy thunder and fairly heavy snowfall, the tiny sharp ice pellets known as
graupel. Over supper I talked a lot with
Nastya, Irina and Volodya, milking them for information. They, as well as a couple of Asia Mountains
guides who were at dinner, were dubious of me walking to Camp Two the next day
alone, as there are some serious crevasses in the underlying glacier. I arranged to set off with them the next day
so that I could rope up with them in case of a fall into a crevasse. However that evening, as we sat around the
dining table reading and chatting, the graupel continued to fall steadily. The Russian trio eventually decided to
postpone moving uphill for a day, and I was happy to take a day off as well
after two days that had been substantially longer and harder than I had
anticipated.

Fresh snow at Camp One, with the summit behind

Saturday, July 7th was
a deliciously lazy day. When we woke up
there was a good 20 cm of fresh snow and my Asia Mountains tent nearly
collapsed under the weight of it, and nobody opted to head further up until the
snow had a chance to settle or melt. I
had slept poorly again, getting up several times in the night to pee, and
tossing restlessly with a racing pulse.
I had to admit that I wasn’t at all acclimatized to this relatively low
altitude of 4400 m, despite the previous month’s hiking. I found it mysterious and not at all
reassuring; part of my planning for the mountain had been predicated on being
acclimatized and fit and moving uphill relatively rapidly. Between the bad weather and the lack of
acclimatization, this relatively rapid pace seemed unlikely to work. I packed a bag to take to Camp Two the next
morning; again I was planning to do two carries to Camp Two, sleeping at Camp
One inbetween.

Beautiful view of the summit from Camp One

Those of us heading uphill the
next morning were up in the dark at 4:30 am (I slept through a couple of alarms
and was only woken by the noise made by other climbers getting ready). By 5 am we were at breakfast, and by 6:15 am
we were underway. This early start was
said to be necessary to get firm ice on the glacier as well as to beat the heat
in the much-feared Skovorodka (the Frying Pan) just below Camp Two. Once again I felt poorly acclimatized,
panting and moving slowly. I stuck with
the three Russians until we had gotten over a pretty scary crevasse that we
crossed with a running leap, aided by a rope pull from ahead (Volodya had leapt
it cleanly without the rope, but Nastya and Irina and I were grateful for some
assistance). We stayed roped up on the
flat section of the glacier, reputedly the most crevasse-ridden part, and then
up the first steep pitch, but then I let them move ahead as I was moving like a
slug. The distance between us widened
rapidly as I laboriously trudged up the slope, easily the slowest climber on
the mountain.

Climbers retreating downhill from Camp Two across the Frying Pan

By noon I had only made it
to an altitude of 5000 m, and it was 2:00 pm before I entered the Frying
Pan. It lived up to its name, with no
wind to cool me and the UV radiation off the flat snow and ice roasting
me. It seemed unbearably hot, and it
seemed to take forever for me to cross this open space, past an avalanche-prone
slope. In 1990 avalanches, triggered by
earthquakes, wiped out Camp Two in its previous location underneath this slope;
43 climbers died in what is still the largest single death toll in
mountaineering history. The snow had
softened enough in the afternoon heat that I was constantly sinking in to
mid-thigh, further reducing my snail’s pace.
It was 5:00 pm when I staggered, completely spent, into Camp Two, a
compact village of perhaps 25 tents on a fairly steep slope at 5350 metres
above sea level. It had taken me almost
11 hours to cover what fit, acclimatized climbers usually do in 5 hours. My lack of fitness and lack of altitude
acclimatization was clearly evident.

Since it was so late in the day,
there was no question of retreating back to Camp One that evening. I put up my Crux mountaineering tent, first
digging a new tent platform into the snow slope with my avalanche shovel. I was on my own now; Asia Mountains’ tents
and food stopped at Camp One. I used my
shovel handle and blade (separately), my ice axe and two ice screws to fasten
down the guy ropes of the tent. I set up
the tent, melted some snow (always a slow process) and cooked up bouillon with
croutons, eggs and cheese, chatting with a couple of ultralight mountaineers
from Kamchatka squeezed into one tiny tent.
I made some instant ramen noodles
as well, but I just couldn’t stomach them, so I put them aside for breakfast
instead. One item that I hadn’t brought
up from Camp One was my ThermaRest air mattress, so I made do with my foamie
undermattress, not ideal on the snow. I
was very cold and bone tired when I crawled into bed at 7:30 pm.

I was in my sleeping bag for over
12 hours that night, although the second half of the night my slumber was
disturbed by the sound of howling winds.
I had heard from other climbers who had been further up the mountain
that it was unrelentingly windy once they got above Camp Two, and now the winds
were scouring our camp as well.

The peak reflected in Irina's sunglasses

I felt really tired and sore when
I got up, and it took two groggy hours to melt snow and cook up some
breakfast. By 10:30 I was headed back
down the mountain with an empty backpack, leaving my tent erected and my gear
and food inside. It took only 3 easy
hours to descend what it had taken 11 hours to ascend, and much of that time
was spent on the flat part of the glacier on the final approach back to Camp
One. I had been dreading the killer
crevasse all day, wondering whether I would have the nerve to leap it on my
own, and yet I never even saw it on the descent; in only one day the glacier
had moved far enough for it to fill in the crevasse by itself. It was more than a little unnerving to find
the ground beneath my feet so rapidly changeable. When I got back to Camp One, I was glad to
tuck into a hearty stew and some freshly baked bread. In my absence Marcos, the snowboarder, had
returned healthy from Osh and had been moved into my tent as my tentmate. I had a sociable afternoon and evening
chatting with him, and with Asia Mountains’ most glamorous guide, the young
powerhouse climber Dasha Yashina, as well as her client Alex Goldfarb, a
Russian-born Harvard Medical School researcher on kidney function. I fell asleep to the disconcerting booming
echoes of seracs falling somewhere up on the glacier.

Showing off my crampons, with the summit ridge behind

The next morning was Tuesday,
July 10th, and I was up at 4 am (I heard my alarm this time!),
breakfasting at 5 and off by 5:30. The
skies were clear and cold, and Jupiter, Venus and Mercury were all glittering
in the pre-dawn sky. The snow and ice
were much harder than two days previously, and I finally felt as though I might
be getting a bit better acclimatized; perhaps retreating back from 5350 m to
4400 m had improved things. I had
another load of food, fuel and gear in my bag, although it was definitely
lighter than two days before. I was
still slower than most climbers on the mountain (particularly the professional
guides and porters, who scampered past me), but I was at Camp Two by 12:30,
seven hours after setting off. On the
way I was passed by Dasha and Alex, and met Volodya, Nastya and Irina
retreating back to Camp One for a rest, along with my Kamchatka neighbours. Six of the eight Slovenians I had met in base
camp were on their way up as well. It
was good weather and everyone was on the move.

Camp Two that afternoon was
oppressively hot and still, with UV radiation pouring off the snow. I tried to nap in my tent, but it was too
hot. I repacked a load of food that I
planned to carry up to Camp Three the next day, cooked up some eggs and scarfed
down as much nuts, cheese and bouillon as I could stomach. I had been talked into buying no fewer than
10 gas canisters from the Asia Mountains office in Osh, but only now did I
finish the first of them; I was clearly carrying an excessive supply. After lunch the first clouds of the day
rolled in and soon enough it was snowing again, blowing through a small gap in
the fly where I had melted the zipper in a fit of inattention earlier in the
day. More eggs and more hideously
indigestible ramen noodles, along with my first package of dehydrated rations
(a potato stew), with lots of butter melted into it for extra calories, did for
supper.

That evening I lay in my tent
listening to the wind howl. I had been
gathering intelligence from other groups of climbers, and what I heard didn’t
sound very good. Although the next
stage, up to Camp Three, was shorter than either of the previous two legs in
terms of horizontal distance, it was still another 800 vertical metres, and via
a somewhat convoluted route up a ridge, over a bump (Razdelnaya Peak) and then down to a slightly
sheltered spot where Camp Three is usually pitched. The accepted figure for time held that it
would be three hours to Razdelnaya, and then another hour to
reach the camp. The 4 Canadian med
students I had met at Osh airport had been up towards Camp Three that day and
had been turned back by howling winds halfway.
I heard that it was in fact the first day of the season that anyone had
made it as far up as Camp Three, although that didn’t seem entirely
plausible. The winds were said to be
strong enough to pick you up off your feet, and to have been this strong for a
week. I wrote up a plan in my diary that
evening that saw me on top of the mountain five days later, then went to sleep.

Wednesday, July 11th
marked a week since my arrival at base camp, and I was up early to crisp, cold,
clear weather. I felt tired and groggy, so I had a leisurely
breakfast omelette, then sat lazing and talking, trying to overcome
lassitude. My plan was to carry a load
of supplies up the mountain to Camp Three, stash them there, and then come back
to Camp Two. At 9:45 I set off up the
steep slope right behind camp. I made
good time, reaching the top of the pitch within an hour. As began walking along the relatively level
ground from there, somebody flipped the weather switch and suddenly clouds
started to roll in, driven by a pounding wind.
I struggled onwards, trying to follow previous tracks (not an easy task,
given the blowing snow that was filling them in), and talking to groups
retreating from above; several groups had turned back before Camp Three, and
nobody recommended going onwards, as the wind just got worse with altitude. I kept trudging, but at noon, atop a knoll at
about 5700 metres, I decided to turn back in the face of some of the worst
winds I had ever felt on a mountain. I
buried my food and gas canisters in the snow, marked it with a distinctive
arrangement of rocks and turned back at 12:30.
It took only half an hour to race back to camp, blown downhill by a wind
that seemed to have a malevolent personality of its own. Camp Two was also raked by the same
gale-force winds and I spent the afternoon sheltering from the wind, eating a
ton and chatting with Dasha while dramatic clouds formed over the ridge before
being ripped away by gusts. It was
awe-inspiring, but hardly confidence-inspiring.

Dasha Yashina

I passed out in my tent for two
hours of oblivious sleep and woke up to continuing gales. For the first time I found myself wondering
if I was really going to be able to summit, between the terrible weather,
unseasonably deep snow, continuing lack of acclimatization and physical
weakness. I had been shocked that
afternoon to feel how much leg muscle I had lost during my week on the
mountain; the only other time I had ever experienced that was during my bout of
rheumatic fever in Urumqi back in 2002, and that hadn’t ended at all well. I continued to be puzzled at how poorly my
body was reacting to altitudes that I had had no problem with a month earlier. I also found myself tearing up with emotion
as I lay reading classic poems on my Kindle in the tent, and remembered that
this had been an early sign of physical breakdown on my bike in the weeks
before Urumqi. The fact that far more
experienced climbers than myself were also talking about the low odds of
success also gave me pause for thought. I had read beforehand that about 29% of climbers on Peak Lenin are successful, and I was beginning to see why that might be.

That night I lay in my tent,
unable to fall asleep because of the deafening roar of the wind and the
crackling and shaking of my tent. I was
glad that I had such a well-constructed tent, but it didn’t make sleeping any
easier. I finally passed out from pure
exhaustion at 2 am. When I awoke at 8
am, the winds had dropped slightly, but were still fearsome. Most of the climbers in Camp Two were on
their way downhill, and I saw several tents that had completely shredded during
the night. I decided to sit tight and
see how the weather developed, and spent the day lying in my tent reading, napping
and eating. By evening there were only a
handful of us left in camp, and my diary records that the two things that
concerned me the most were the continuing evaporation of muscle from my legs
and my butt, and the fact that snow was being driven up under the flap of the
fly and onto the mesh of the inner tent, from where it fell in a fine dust onto
me and my sleeping bag to melt and increase the misery factor.

My view from the tent in Camp Two

Friday, July 13th was
a decisive day. I barely slept again as
the wind continued its sonic assault, and I awoke tired, sore and weak. I had breakfast, then trudged uphill with an
empty backpack to fetch the fuel and food I had cached two days earlier. Even without carrying a load, I was slower
and weaker than I had been before, and was barely able to stagger up to the
cache. This made my mind up. It was going to take far longer than the time
I had allotted for Peak Lenin to get acclimatized and fit, and given the
weather, success was going to be doubtful for anybody in this weather window. I returned to Camp Two, packed up everything
and set off on the long, heavy trudge back downhill to the sybaritic comforts of Camp
One. Just as I approached Camp One, I
met a group of several British climbers with whom I had a good chat; one of
them, a hard-looking nurse named Tim, would end up being the only climber
(other than mountain guides) that I met on the mountain who would end up summiting. I settled into my Asia Mountains tent and had
an enormous meal, trying to regain some of the weight I had lost over the past
week. I felt very disappointed not to
have summited, but I figured that I might as well rebuild my strength and focus
on making my Muztagh Ata ascent a more successful enterprise. Ironically the weather had improved, and
everyone else in Camp One was planning to move up to Camp Two the next day,
even as I was descending. I was assailed
by self-doubt; was I just being a wimp, or was it the right move?

Lovely sunset colours seen from Camp One

The next day I lazed around Camp
One, eating, reading, taking pictures and waiting for a horse to carry my
luggage back to base camp; I had decided that carrying heavy loads hadn’t
helped me acclimatize; it had just made me tired, and wasted my leg
muscles. After lunch a horse and owner
appeared from Base Camp and I negotiated a price to carry my gear. It was amazing how easy it was to walk
downhill, breathing progressively thicker and thicker air, unencumbered by
weight. We set off at 3, and by 6 o’clock
I was back in a big orange tent, overjoyed to be surrounded by green grass,
wildflowers, marmots and relative warmth.
After being in the lifeless white desert of the high mountains, this
profusion of plants and animals was balm to a bruised and battered soul. I spent the evening chatting with Dasha’s
client Alex, and playing chess in the mess tent against a couple of my fellow
climbers. Alex and Dasha's presence in base camp wasn't surprising; the standard Russian/post-Soviet plan of attack on a big mountain like this was always to establish camps up the mountain, then retreat to base camp for a couple of days to rest up and recover before moving briskly up the mountain to the summit. Dasha and Alex were planning on heading up to Camp One the next day to start their final push to the summit.

At Peak Lenin base camp, with the peak just out of view to the left

I spent Sunday, July 15th in Base
Camp, in beautiful weather, as there was no jeep available to take me back to
Osh until the next day. I walked, talked
with climbers, took photos and sunned myself in the afternoon warmth. I felt a bit of envy looking uphill at what
looked like good climbing conditions on the slopes of Peak Lenin, but it still
looked windy higher up, with flags of spindrift hanging from the ridges and the
summit. That evening, after more chess
(I love the fact that the post-Soviet world is so full of keen chess players!),
I drew up a list of mistakes I had made, and reasons why I was leaving Peak
Lenin empty-handed. It read:

Insufficient
time budgeted (the ultimate root of the failure)

Insufficient
sense of how big a mountain Peak Lenin is, and how much distance is involved

Too
few rest days budgeted in

Not appreciating the importance of descending to recharge physically and
mentally

Carrying
too heavy a load

Assuming
that my Ladakh acclimatization would carry over

Not
realizing the extent to which my muscles would waste at high altitude (it had
never been an issue before)

Overestimating
my own physical strength and stamina

Underestimating
the effects of heat and glare, particularly on the climb across the Frying Pan

Letting
myself get physically run down

Wearing
myself out on the first two days unneccesarily

Relying
too much on analogy with my experience on Aconcagua

The
fact that I was now 43, instead of 32 as I had been on Aconcagua

Overconfidence

Extraordinary
wind

Deeper
snow than usual for this time of year

A probable mild case of sunstroke on the first trip across the Frying Pan

I started reading up on Muztagh
Ata, and trying to sketch out a plan of attack; it may have been Pamirs 1,
Hazenberg 0 but I was going to try to equalize the score on the next mountain!

Alex Goldfarb saying prayers in base camp

On Monday, July 16th,
barely 12 days after arriving in base camp, I found myself being driven back to
Osh by the same driver as before, Marat. Four hours
later I was deposited in the Sunrise II guesthouse and went out to try to get a
flight back to Bishkek. There was nothing
until Wednesday, so I had an enforced day of eating, reading and catching up on
e-mail. I also finally got a Kyrgyz SIM
card for my phone, and used it to call Terri in Switzerland. When I got through, she was in tears, and
told me that Roger Payne, her neighbour in Leysin and a close personal friend,
a man whom I knew well, had been killed a few days earlier in a massiveavalanche while guiding two clients up Mont Blanc. A huge slab of ice and snow had hurtled down
hundreds of metres off Mont Maudit and killed Roger, his two clients and six
other climbers in one of the worst climbing accidents in recent years in the Alps. Terri was devastated at his sudden death, and
it put my own “failure” on Peak Lenin into sobering perspective; I hadn’t summited, but
at least I was safely down in the lowlands afterwards. Roger’s death would hang over my thoughts and
my decision-making over the weeks to come. Roger had left behind his climbing partner and wife to grieve for him; I really didn't want to impose the same burden of grief on Terri, so I was determined to err on the side of caution.

Finally, on Wednesday, July 18th,
exactly two weeks after flying from Bishkek to Osh, I flew in the opposite
direction, headed to the Asia Mountains hotel/headquarters and met up with my
friend Eric, ready for the next phase of this summer of Central Asian mountain
adventures.